The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life (20 page)

In Tehran she’d grown accustomed to walking with her eyes cast down and if anyone spoke to her in the streets she immediately quickened her step. Now she ambled around town for hours all by herself, smiling and chirping greetings as she went, and the fact that no one said much more to her than “
Guten Tag
” only increased her feeling of liberty.

At first Lili walked without any particular purpose in mind, but she found one soon enough. With her first month’s allowance from
Sohrab she bought herself a tube of red lipstick, a pair of white gloves with a pearl set at each wrist, a bag of peaches, a pot of geraniums for her balcony, and a pillbox hat she liked to wear cocked to one side. What was left—about half of her allowance—that month and in all the months to come she sent back to Kobra in Tehran.

The funds would be much needed, as Kobra’s circumstances had turned dire since Lili had left Iran.

After twenty years of a marriage punctuated by countless separations, two divorces, and many more near divorces, Kobra had left Sohrab’s house for good. This momentous break was not attended by any formal petition or document of any kind, but Kobra did not doubt the finality of the move. With both Nader and Lili in Europe, Khanoom and Sohrab’s sisters would not be hauling Kobra back to his house or to their own house on Avenue Moniriyeh, and with Sohrab still in thrall to his blue-eyed jinn, even her most heartfelt labors were inadequate to secure a corner of his house.

She spent the first few weeks at her mother’s house. Long since inured to Kobra’s comings and goings, Pargol still kept a spare room free for her, but this time Kobra felt herself less than welcome there. In recent years Pargol had been content to delegate most of the day-to-day affairs of her household to one of her daughters-in-law. Kobra’s first few days back passed amiably enough, but when it was discovered that this time Kobra’s stay was to be permanent, there was suddenly less meat in Kobra’s portions at dinner—with a corresponding coolness in Kobra’s own manner toward her sister-in-law. The quarrel threatened to turn violent when Kobra discovered that someone had taken a pair of scissors to one of her best dresses in the night, reducing it to shreds. Her sister-in-law swore her innocence on the graves of seven generations of her ancestors, but this did nothing to dissuade Kobra of the culprit’s identity.

Kobra left the house in a huff and and found herself a flat in a derelict quarter of the city, on Zahirodolleh Alley. The landlord had not been keen to rent to her, a single woman. “Trouble,” he said, shaking his head, “always trouble,” but in the end he’d found himself unable to refuse the bills she pressed into his hands. To support herself, Kobra began taking in sewing here and there, mostly for women in the neighborhood but only as much as was strictly necessary. She ate just milk and flatbread, and quite often she forgot to eat at all. And so great did her losses now seem that not even the great passion of the last several years, her passion for real estate, could spur her toward greater enterprise.

Kobra would entertain just one visitor in her new home, her former son-in-law, Kazem. When news of Lili’s departure from Iran reached him, Kazem wasted no time seeking Kobra out on Zahirodolleh Alley. By then there was nothing at all left of the courtesies with which he’d once approached her at Sohrab’s house. The one time she refused to open the door for Kazem, he made such a scene that the landlord threatened to put her out and keep the month’s rent as penalty for the disturbance. It was impossible to turn Kazem away after that.

As soon as she heard him knocking at her door—three hard, quick raps—Kobra would spring at once to her feet. Kazem would shoulder his way past her and make a quick search of the apartment’s three small rooms. When he finished rifling through the drawers and cupboards and tossing the contents about the floor, he’d grab her by the wrist or the neck, grind the heel of his shoe over her bare foot, and demand that she tell him where Lili had gone, and with whom.

“I know nothing,” Kobra would tell him, careful always to keep her voice low, her face impassive. “I know nothing at all.”

“May her spine rot—and yours, too, you hag!”

These episodes invariably left her trembling and rushing to the stove to burn wild rue to cancel out the curse, but however
unsettling, however terrifying, Kazem’s visits were not mentioned in any of Kobra’s missives to Lili. “I have nothing to complain of but your absence,” Kobra’s nieces wrote to Lili on her behalf. Of Sara, Kobra consistently reported: “She is thriving in her grandmother’s care,” and Lili, newly arrived in Germany, had no reason at all to doubt the honesty of Kobra’s claims.

One day, after Kazem had come round for her and she felt herself growing truly desperate, Kobra raised her eyes and then her palms heavenward. She stated her case in the simplest terms. On account of the blue-eyed jinn she now had no husband and no home. One child—her littlest, her baby—was dead and now her other two had been spirited away. Of Kazem’s torments she felt no need to say anything at all. “I leave the judgment to You,” she said finally. Kobra lowered her gaze, folded her hands back into her lap, and then she began waiting for her answer.

Since his own arrival in Germany several months earlier, Nader had taken a room in a house of five women, a widow and her four young daughters. They were all exquisitely beautiful—with long, flaxen curls and bright blue eyes—but none more so than Margarethe, the sister with the shriveled arm. “A birth defect,” Nader had whispered in Lili’s ear before taking her to visit the family for the first time. “Something to do with a drug her mother took during the war.”

He proceeded to explain that the three other daughters of the house left each morning at dawn for jobs in town, leaving Margarethe and her mother, Isolde, to labor in their tiny cottage kitchen. Isolde baked fruit pies she sold to restaurants and boardinghouses while Margarethe sewed tablecloths, dish towels, and aprons. When Lili first laid eyes on her, Margarethe was holding a large square of yellow-and-white-checkered fabric between her toes and working her needle and thread through it with her good arm. She was to Lili
a vision of industriousness and good cheer, and through the ensuing months of their friendship Lili would rarely encounter the girl otherwise.

Margarethe was also exceedingly bright. No sooner had Lili offered her one of her cheery but poorly pronounced “
Guten Tags
” than Margarethe proposed, for a small weekly fee, to tutor her in German. From then on, three afternoons a week Lili walked from her room in town, through an enormous wheat field buzzing with insects, and into the crumbling four-room cottage for her German lessons. Margarethe’s pedagogical method consisted of ordering Lili to memorize twenty words from the dictionary every night and then teasing her as she struggled to pronounce them. As the tutorial progressed, the cottage filled with the aroma of vanilla, cinnamon, plums, and apples, distracting Lili no end from her studies. On some lucky days, she and Margarethe ate the slightly burnt pies Isolde could not hope to sell in town.

Lili spent her evenings in the boardinghouse poring over her newly acquired German grammar books until all the
ders
and
dies
and
dases
threatened to make her head burst, and then she’d go sit on her balcony and watch the people in the street below. On Saturday and Sunday evenings she joined her brother in town, looked on as he held court with his many new friends, and thought about all the wonderful things to come.

There were few jobs for a foreign girl like her, but at Sohrab’s word Nader had made inquiries and secured a spot for her as an orderly at a foundling hospital run by Catholic nuns. If she did well there, Nader promised her, she could eventually earn a place in medical school. She’d be a doctor! The prospect thrilled her, and so Lili wasted no time in joining the ranks of skinny, dark-skinned immigrant girls—Turks, Greeks, Yugoslavians—who’d come to Germany after World War II to be thrown together with no common language, and jobs that left them little time to wonder about
one another’s circumstances or even to give much thought to their own.

They would assemble at the clinic doors each day at dawn and wait there until Schwester Maria appeared with her white robes billowing behind her and her headgear rising a full two feet up and three feet across. Each girl was given a headpiece identical to the nuns’. This item was to be Lili’s first true source of agony abroad. The headgear seemed to wrinkle and smudge the moment she placed it onto her head. She could not get the knack of holding her head still enough to balance it and therefore resorted to shuttling down the corridors clutching her headdress with one hand and her loads of diapers and bottles with the other. Worst of all, twice a week her headgear was disassembled, bleached, starched, pressed, and at last returned to her in individual components to be reassembled by her own hand. She ruined half a dozen fresh bundles before Schwester Maria stated flatly she would be sent away if she could not manage to pin her headgear neatly. The terror induced by this warning sharpened her mind sufficiently for her to master the skill.

The clinic was devoted to the care of abandoned infants, ranging from newborns to toddlers, who were too sickly to be housed in a regular orphanage. The infants arrived with measles and mumps, whooping cough, shingles, broken limbs, and an assortment of unclassified fevers and random gastrointestinal ailments. Some recovered within days or weeks, while others would linger in the clinic indefinitely, or, in the very worst cases, permanently.

Attachment to any particular child was discouraged by the nuns, but Lili quickly found a favorite among the three dozen or so orphans, a blond, blue-eyed boy called Franz. He’d been born with a congenital lung disease and lay tethered to a hunkering respirator. Her heart fell each time she passed his cot. When no one was looking, she cooed over him and whispered Iranian folk songs in his ears, with the result that soon enough he refused to take his bottle
from any of the other orderlies and Lili took increasing pride in the motherly skills she’d someday lavish again on her own child.

Their bond would go unnoticed, as the rest of the clinic was involved in its own love affair with a seven-month-old black baby rumored to be the abandoned offspring of a local German girl and an American soldier. The baby had appeared one day at the clinic with a face and torso covered in plum-colored splotches. They called him Kenya and treated him like a visiting royal. At any hour of the day a crowd of nuns, nurses, doctors, administrators, orderlies, and janitors could be found clustered around his crib, vying with one another for a chance to hold him. Kenya spent several weeks being coddled and fussed over until finally the splotches disappeared and one of the doctors took him to live in his own house.

Lili was shown the precise methods for bathing and diapering and swaddling the infants, and she practiced until her hands seemed to fly through the various steps. Twice a day she wheeled the babies onto the balcony so that they could take their naps in the open air. The humid summer days gave way to autumn and then slowly to winter, but in all but the heaviest snowstorms she was ordered to wheel the babies onto the balcony for their naps. As she stood watch over the rows of cots, she shivered and pulled her cardigan tighter and tighter about herself. Within minutes the little faces turned bright pink and even in some cases purplish, but when she expressed her worry the nuns assured her that the change in the infants’ complexions was but the thoroughly wholesome effect of the pure Black Forest air.

One afternoon in late October the housemistress slipped a letter under the door to Lili’s room. She was busy dressing and did not immediately rise to fetch it. On her way out some time later, Lili bent down and picked up the envelope and discovered that it was the most recent letter she had written to her father. She turned it
over and noticed a faint stamp, in Persian, on the back of the envelope. She struggled to make out the words. “No such person at this address.”
Strange
, she thought idly. She checked the address again and, finding it identical to the one in her little brown notebook, she placed the letter back on her desk.

Nader appeared at the clinic for her the following morning. It was a rare occurrence, made stranger by his pale, stricken face. In place of one of his brightly colored neckties he was wearing a thin black tie.

“What’s this?” she asked, lifting the tail of Nader’s tie and waving it slightly.

He yanked the tie from her hand. “It’s the new style, you donkey,” he replied. It was his old endearment for her, but he did not smile as he said it. “Listen,” he told her, clearing his voice. “I’ve got to go back to Iran for a while.”

“Iran?”

He nodded.

“For how long?”

“Two or three months.”

“Two or three months! But what about your studies?”

Nader would tell her nothing more that afternoon, but when she reached her room at the end of the day she would find a note from him under her door.

Father has died in a car accident. I must leave for Iran on Sunday.

Lili read the note three, seven, ten times.
Impossible, impossible, impossible
, she thought.
He cannot be dead
. But then her hands began to shake and a terrible cry heaved up from her chest. She gripped the metal bars of her canopied bed and began shaking it with such force that the housemistress rounded the stairs in nothing more than a robe and house slippers to see what could be the matter with the Iranian
girl. Within minutes a half-dozen other lodgers had crowded around her. “
Was ist? Was ist den, Madele?
[What is it?, What is it, miss?]
Sind Sie krank?
[Are you sick?]” One of them held her shoulders, another one stroked her hair, and a third brought her a glass of water. Though their voices sounded kind, she begged them with whatever words she had to leave her alone.

She stayed in the room for three days, neither eating nor sleeping, eyes wide and unseeing, and then early the next Sunday morning she went to her brother. She had made up her mind. She would go back to Iran with him.